What if you could “retarget” the audiences of specific websites that likely have similar visitor profiles as yours? The self-serve retargeting platform, Perfect Audience, has begun testing this concept with roughly 100 of its customers.

The company’s new service, Perfect Audience Connect, offers gives advertisers a way to connect with other companies they are familiar with and share retargeting audiences with one another — all in a way that doesn’t drive up bids.

Like a social network, each advertiser on Perfect Audience now has its own profile page on the portal showing information about the company, site traffic, the types of visitors they want to reach and the number of Connect partners it already has. A Potential Partner list shows companies that have cookie pools that overlap with the company’s own audience.

From within Connect, companies can send requests directly to contacts at companies they already know, or they can tap their LinkedIn networks to make connections. If a request is accepted, both companies can then “retarget” the other’s visitors. Campaigns can be launched at the partner level, and a dashboard provides performance reporting by partner as well.

Brad Flora, Perfect Audience CEO and co-founder, said the idea came after talking with customers who were already doing retargeting and were looking for more opportunities to reach new, high intent audiences. The piece that took the team the longest to develop was BidGuard, a bidding technology they built to keep the bidding between partners and the retargeting list owner non-competitive. The technology gives the bid to the primary cookie holder and eliminates a bidding war between the original list owner and its partners.

“We’re using Perfect Audience Connect because it’s very difficult to reach our target audience, developers, without paying a fortune. By teaming up with other developer-focused companies on Perfect Audience we’re acquiring leads at a fraction of the cost of AdWords in a repeatable fashion,” says John Sheehan of Runscope, a company that helps developers debug and test their APIs.

While targeting other audiences is more expensive than retargeting to their own lists, Flora says customers so far are finding it 40 to 60 percent more efficient than traditional prospecting. Another use case they’ve seen for Connect is parent companies using the service to advertise across their own sites.

Flora says the team is working on adding more networks beyond Facebook to the program and sees Connect as an opportunity to become “a switchboard for audiences” that can be targeted across multiple channels.

About The Author

As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.